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7.1 Replication Overview

Database replication has an undeserved reputation for being complex to set up and prone to failure. The early versions of MySQL replication were difficult to configure because the process was inadequately documented. In its most basic form, replication consists of two servers: a master and a slave. The master records all queries that change data in its binary log. The slave connects to the master, reads queries from the master's binary log, and executes them against its local copy of the data.

Before peering under the hood, let's look at the types of problems replication does and doesn't solve. If you're reading this in the hopes of deploying replication to cure a problem, this section may help you decide whether you're on the right track.

7.1.1 Problems Solved with Replication

Replication isn't perfect, but it can be quite useful in solving several classes of problems in the areas of scalability and backups.

7.1.1.1 Data distribution

Need to maintain a copy of your data 10,000 miles away? Replication makes it trivial to do so. As long as you have decent connectivity between two sites, you can replicate a MySQL database. Think of this as scaling geographically.

In fact, it's possible to use replication over a network connection that isn't "always on," such as traditional dial-up using PPP. You can simply let the slave fail and reconnect (it'll keep trying for a long time). Or you can use one of the SLAVE STOP commands (described later) to disable the slave's replication when no connection is available. The master doesn't mind if a slave disconnects for a few hours and then reconnects. But you can't let the slave go for too long without reconnecting to the master, because the older record of changes will eventually be purged to keep the master from running out of disk space.

Of course, you can also use replication between two servers that sit next to each other. Any time you need multiple up-to-date copies of your MySQL data, replication is often the easiest solution. You can even replicate data between two MySQL servers on the same machine, which is often a good way to test a new version of MySQL without using a second machine.

7.1.1.2 Load balancing

If you use MySQL on a large data warehousing application or a popular web site, odds are that your server is running many more read queries (SELECT) than write queries (INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). If that's the case, replication is an excellent way to support basic load balancing. By having one or more slave servers, you can spread most of the work among several servers.

The trick, of course, is coming up with an effective way to spread the queries among the available slaves so they get roughly equal workloads. One simple approach is to use round-robin DNS. Assign multiple IP addresses for a hostname such as db-slave.example.com, and your application will connect to one at random each time it opens a new connection to MySQL.[1]

[1] Some operating systems don't randomize this very well.

A more sophisticated approach involves the same solutions that are used in web server load balancing. Network load-balancing products from Foundry Networks, Cisco, Nortel, and others work just as well for MySQL as they do for web sites.[2] The same is true of software solutions such as the Linux Virtual Server (LVS) project (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/).

[2] That's not entirely true, as you'll soon see.

Load-balancing techniques are covered in greater detail in Chapter 8.

7.1.1.3 Backup and recovery

Backing up a busy MySQL server can be difficult when your clients demand access to the data 24 hours a day. Rather than deal with the complexity of implementing a backup process that minimizes the impact on your clients, you might find it easier simply to configure a slave server and back it up instead. Because the slave will have an exact copy of the data, it's just as good as backing up the master. Plus you'll never impact the clients who are using the master. You might even decide that you don't necessarily need or want to back up the data as long as you have the "hot spare" slave database available in the case of problems with the master.

Chapter 9 covers backup and recovery techniques in more detail.

7.1.1.4 High availability and failover

Using replication, you can avoid making MySQL (or the system hosting it) a single point of failure in your applications. Although there's no out-of-the-box, automated failover solution for MySQL, you can achieve a good degree of high availability using some relatively simple techniques.

Using a creative DNS setup, you can insulate your applications from having to know which server is the master and minimize the effort involved in switching to a slave when the master fails.

Let's suppose you have two MySQL servers, db1.example.com and db2.example.com. Rather than hardcoding the name of the master in your applications, you can set up db.example.com as a CNAME (or alias) in DNS for your master. By using a very low Time To Live (TTL) on the DNS record, you can ensure that clients will not cache the information longer than necessary.

In the event your master goes down, simply update your DNS to point db.example.com at the new master. As soon as the TTL expires, your applications will pick up the new information and connect to the proper server. There will be some time during which the applications can't contact MySQL, but that time will be relatively brief if you use a low enough TTL.[3]

[3] Be careful not to set it too low, however. The DNS resolvers shipped with some operating systems have been known to simply ignore TTLs that are deemed to be too low. When in doubt, test the implementation before depending on it to work.

If you'd like to eliminate entirely the need to use DNS, you can play similar games using IP addresses. Because it's trivial to add and remove additional IP addresses from a server, a scheme like this may serve you well:

  • Use an IP address for each role, such as 192.168.1.1 for the master and an address in the 192.168.1.100-192.168.120 range for each slave.

  • Make sure each machine has its own primary IP address in addition to the role-based IP address.

  • When the master goes down, any of the slaves can be scripted to pick up the IP address and immediately take over.

  • The master should be set so that if it ever loses its master address or goes down, it doesn't automatically pick up the address again (i.e., it assumes someone else will).

See the "High Availability" section of Chapter 8 for more on the topic.

7.1.2 Problems Not Solved with Replication

Replication doesn't solve every problem. Performance can become an issue with replication because every slave still needs to execute the same write queries as the master. In a very write-heavy application, slaves need to be at least as powerful as the master. If you attempt to use replication to set up a load-balancing system, you may be disappointed. It may be more productive to implement a partitioning system with multiple masters—one for each partition of the data.

Also, there's no guarantee that a slave will be completely in sync with the master at any given moment. If the load on a slave is relatively high, the slave may fall behind and need time to catch up.

Network bandwidth and latency can also become an issue. If the slave is far away from the master (in a network sense) and there isn't sufficient bandwidth, a slave may be able to keep up with the master's query load, but it won't be able to get data fast enough to do so.

Let's look at two specific examples that illustrate problems not easily solved with replication.

7.1.2.1 Real-time data transmission

MySQL's replication isn't the ideal vehicle for transmitting real-time or nearly real-time data such as a stock quote feed or an online auction site. In those applications, it's important that the user sees up-to-date data no matter which database server they use.

The only way to combat MySQL's lack of any latency guarantee is to implement your own monitoring system. It needs to use some sort of heartbeat to verify that each server has a reasonably up-to-date copy of the data. In the event that a server falls too far behind, the monitoring system needs to proactively remove it from the list of active servers until it can catch up.

Of course, you can also build your application in such a way that it updates all the slaves with the newest data. However, that can add a lot of complexity and may not be worth the effort. You'd end up writing a lot of code to handle the exceptional conditions, such as when a single server falls behind or is intermittently inaccessible. Testing and debugging all those situations can be very time-consuming and difficult.

As Derek went over this, he thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if MySQL could provide a query response that signified, `Go ask another server, I'm really busy right now'?" This would allow clients to automatically find willing servers in a multihost DNS rotation.

For example, the client wants to connect to db.example.com (which is db1, db2, and db3). It connects (randomly) to db2, and the server answers the query with "I'm busy; go ask someone else," whereupon the client knows enough to try db1 or db3. Because the client library would be connecting to the same virtual server, it could transparently disconnect from the busy server and connect to some other (hopefully less busy) server.

As a result, all you would need is some automated way for a slave server to know how far behind they are and to shut themselves off from queries when they get too far behind, and you'd have some protection. Of course, this could also be subject to a cascading failure. If all the slaves are very busy, the last thing you'd want is for them to start removing themselves from the pool of available servers. Continue on to Chapter 8 for a deeper discussion of these issues.

7.1.2.2 Online ordering

An ordering system is different from a real-time stock quote feed or an auction site in a couple of important ways. First, the ratio of reads to writes is likely to be much lower. There isn't a constant stream of users running read-only queries against the data. Also, when users are running read queries, they're often part of a larger transaction, so you can't send those read queries to a slave. If you did, the slave might not have the correct data yet. Transactions aren't written to the binary log and therefore sent to slaves until they first commit on the master. A slave will contain only committed transactions.

Replication can still be very useful for an order processing system. It's reasonable to use a slave for running nightly reports and queries that don't need the most recent data.

7.1.3 Replication Performance

Having considered the problems that replication does and doesn't solve, you may still be a bit unsure about using it. Maybe replication is fast enough to get the job done, despite the lack of any performance guarantees built into the system. Wouldn't it be nice to have a general idea of how fast replication really is?

That's exactly what we wanted to know when we first began using replication—partly for our own sanity and partly because we knew a lot of people would soon be interested in MySQL replication. The first question they'd ask is, "How fast is it?" To answer that question, we devised the following simple test to measure the practical minimum replication latency in a particular environment.

A Perl script opened two database connections, one to the master and one to the slave. The master and slave were on the same 100-Mbit switched Ethernet network. The script then inserted a record into the master and immediately attempt to retrieve it from the slave. If the record wasn't available, the script immediately retried. We kept the records intentionally small, containing just an auto-increment column and a VARCHAR field into which we inserted the current time.

The results were encouraging. Of the 1,000 records inserted, 950 of them were available on the first attempt. That left 50 records that required at least a second try. Of those 50, 43 were available on the second attempt. The remaining 7 were there on the third try. The test was quick and very unscientific, but it can help to set realistic expectations.

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